Utopian Politics Research Articles

Media Hoaxing: The Yes Men and Utopian Politics

Media Hoaxing: The Yes Men and Utopian Politics

Кампании по упорядочению пользования служебными автомобилями в СССР (конец 1950-х‑1980-е гг.)

Статья посвящена проблеме, не являвшейся ранее предметом специального исследования в исторической и социологической литературе, – кампаниям по упорядочению пользования служебными автомобилями в СССР в контексте борьбы с привилегиями советского «правящего класса». Исследование подготовлено на базе архивных документов, впервые введенных автором в научный оборот, нормативно-правовых актов, материалов периодической печати, источников личного происхождения. В исследовании автор исходит из признания привилегий для членов партийно-хозяйственной номенклатуры в СССР, носивших «вещный» характер и выражавшихся в том числе в предоставлении части государственного имущества в личное пользование. Основное место уделяется периоду «оттепели», поскольку в конце 1950-х гг. очевидные излишества в материально-бытовом обеспечении номенклатуры впервые стали рассматриваться как социальная проблема. С одной стороны, это обусловливалось пополнением отечественного автопарка; с другой – провозглашением построения общества социальной справедливости. Кампания не прибавила популярности Н. С. Хрущеву в рядах номенклатуры и способствовала его отстранению от власти. В последующие годы все попытки изменить доступ служащих госаппарата к ведомственному транспорту предусматривали мероприятия, опробованные на рубеже 1950–1960-х гг.: передачу машин в автохозяйства общего пользования, уменьшение расходов на содержание служебных машин, использование их без штатных водителей, сокращение парка специальных машин. И ни одна из этих реформ не явилась сколько-нибудь результативной. На примере кампаний по упорядочению пользования ведомственным транспортом в статье рассматривается социальный аспект советской автомобилизации. Автор доказывает, что автомобиль в СССР являлся не только средством передвижения, а одним из важнейших элементов социального порядка. Наделенный символической функцией престижности и принадлежности к привилегированному меньшинству, он выступал своеобразным маркером стратификации общества. В этой связи реформирование служебного автопарка было обречено на неудачу и являлось классическим примером попытки реализации политической утопии по достижению социального равенства.

Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect

Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect

East German museums of everyday history as depots for the nostalgic object

This article centres on two East German museums exclusively dedicated to the storage and display of everyday items produced in the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1989, locating both in the context of similar ‘memory museums’ of East German history, as well as history museums more generally. Examining these sites, the text investigates the types of relationships established with these artefacts of the past, analysing their function as mediators between the inner and outer world, and between memory and history. Taking nostalgia theory and specifically Ostalgie as a starting point for the analysis, it reflects on how the museums serve as containers for a multitude of objects both fantasmatic and material. The aim is to inject nostalgia theory, especially in its focus on materiality, with more distinctly psychosocial ideas and concepts. In order to understand whether there is a finality to the psychic and political transitions that took place after 1989, nostalgia’s link to a utopian politics of the future, rather than to a contested past, is addressed throughout.

Levinas and the question of politics

Recent political critiques and appropriations of Emmanuel Levinas’ work demonstrate the need to fundamentally re-evaluate the meaning and status of his philosophy. Both the Marxist critiques (often apropos Lacan) and ‘third wave’ applications interpret Levinas’ singular and unique relation to others—a bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic, or political context—as the greatest obstacle to a Levinasian politics. From this standpoint, Levinas offers little more than a hyperbolic ethics that, at best, ignores, and, at worst, provides philosophical cover for, the political status quo (often defined by capitalism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism). To counter this established link between Levinas’ philosophy and his potential for political thought, this article reexamines the significance of the decontextualized social relation. I argue that such interpretations misapprehend the intended analytical depth of Levinas’ thought, which, in turn, misconstrue the relationship between Levinas and more traditional social ontologies. As a consequence, Levinas’ valuable normative import for political theory is obscured. By shifting our perspective, we can understand Levinas as articulating a philosophy of political utopianism well-suited to the challenges we face in our present conjuncture.

Multimedia identities: an analysis of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman

This paper will draw on intermediality as a means to gain a deeper insight into the political contribution made by the film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, directed in 1970 by Cinema Novo exponent, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and first screened in 1971. It will argue that, beyond the film’s sensational focus on cannibalism, its intermedial relations bring about a new dimension of hybridity and transnationalism hitherto absent from the Cinema Novo agenda. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman presents a distinctive multiperspectival structure derived from the self-revealing and self-standing form in which its raw materials are shown. For example, Hans Staden’s book was not only a source for the fictional plot, but actual chunks of its text are displayed, alongside sixteenth-century drawings, letters, poems, decrees and testimonials by French and Portuguese colonisers, in the form of title cards or voiceover commentary, often in contradiction with the images and between themselves, thus multiplying the narrative layers that preserve their own, original semantic agency. This Tropicalia-inspired multimedia procedure not only disregards the attachment to medium specificity that had hitherto characterised political cinema in Brazil, but also deconstructs the unified figure of the auteur, held as the supreme creator in the early Cinema Novo days. In this paper, I shall examine the possible political Utopia contained in the film’s hybrid form, which opens up to a supra-national view of the world in which humans, whatever their origin or standing, become mere vessels of their cultural capital.

Continuidades y discontinuidades de la hegemonía en la utopía política: el caso del Congreso Nacional Ciudadano en la Ciudad de México y su utopía pospartidista

Continuidades y discontinuidades de la hegemonía en la utopía política: el caso del Congreso Nacional Ciudadano en la Ciudad de México y su utopía pospartidista

Vivir la transparencia

At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of the glass house fascinated many artists and writers of the European avant-garde. Against the background of urban densification, the ideal of a house with transparent walls questioned the value of intimacy and the attachement to the feeling of homeliness. The dream of an open space where the borders between the inside and the outside, locality and universality, the private and the public sphere would vanish, pervades the writings of Paul Scheerbart, André Breton and Walter Benjamin. First an aesthetic utopia, then a political utopia, the dream of the glass house eventually transformed into the nightmare of totalitarian surveillance. This article highlights the fantasies that crystallised around this unsettling utopia and explains the reasons for its decline.

Mythanalysis of Transhumanism

Transhumanism and posthumanism are American technoscientific utopias taking over the European political utopias of the XIXth century. These new storytelling of engineers self-appointed prophets sound not only naive but also toxic. They glorify the instinct of power of the human being and his desire to defeat death, which are the new promises of the digital age. The author proposes instead hyperhumanism.

Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates

Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates

Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White on the Politics of Historical Representation

AbstractWe do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics. This essay is concerned with this bold and important thesis. It will do so in the context of the politics of historical representation and the fact–value and subjectivity–objectivity distinctions. The subject was also dear to the heart of Ankersmit’s late American colleague Hayden White. Ankersmit is concerned with how historical representations support a future course of action. White, by contrast, was (also) concerned with how historical representations limit a future course of action since they cannot serve as a basis for utopian politics.

Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature

Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature

Cloud Communities: The Dawn of Global Citizenship?

New digital technologies are rapidly changing the global economy and have connected billions of people in deterritoralised social network. Will they also create new opportunities for global citizenship and alternatives to state-based political communities? In his kick-off essay, Liav Orgad takes an optimistic view. Blockchain technology permits to give every human being a unique legal persona and allows individuals to associate in ‘cloud communities’ that may take on several functions of territorial states. 14 commentators discuss this vision. Sceptics assume that states or business corporations have always found ways to capture and use new technologies for their purposes. They emphasise that the political functions of states, including their task to protect human rights, require territorial monopolies of legitimate coercion that cannot be provided by cloud communities. Others point out that individuals would sort themselves out into cloud communities that are internally homogenous which risks to deepen political cleavages within territorial societies. Finally, some authors are concerned that digital political communities will enhance global social inequalities through excluding from access those who are already worse off in the birthright lottery of territorial citizenship. Optimists see instead the great potential of blockchain technology to overcome exclusion and marginalisation based on statelessness or sheer lack of civil registries; they regard it as a tool for enhancing individual freedom, since people are self-sovereign in controlling their personal data; and they emphasise the possibilities for emancipatory movements to mobilise for global justice across territorial borders or to create their own internally democratic political utopias. In the boldest vision, the deficits of cloud communities as voluntary political associations with limited scope of power could be overcome in a global cryptodemocracy that lets all individuals participate on a one-person-one-vote basis in global political decisions.

Utopias of youth: politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the changing role of youth in Nepali Maoism following their transformation from a guerrilla army to a parliamentary party after 2006. Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how the category of youth gained renewed relevance after the war and allowed the Maoist movement to sidestep complicated issues of class in the urban fabric. Building on a Gramscian framework of subaltern politics and Harvey’s ‘dialectical utopianism’, I argue that youth in the post-revolutionary context have become aligned with the political project of building ‘New Nepal’ and that this allows youth, as both a category and a subject position, to emerge as tools for utopian communist politics. Through an analysis of a divided class landscape in Kathmandu, the article documents the new and difficult alignments between Maoist ideals and positions of youth in the city with lasting outcomes for the party’s revolutionary project.

From a Survival Technique to a System of Luxury: Defining Gastronomy in Utopias from Mercier to Fourier

Scholars can trace the origins of the cultural field of gastronomy by examining French utopian literature from the turn of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century. Utopian literature from this period re-situated gourmandise in an Enlightenment discourse focused on sociability and sensuality. It elevated the act of eating to a topic worthy of serious scrutiny and shifted the conversation from food as sustenance to food as pleasure. This article examines culinary consumption in three utopias: Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, and Charles Fourier's Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générals. The culinary utopias which reflect Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du goût (1825) the most are not structured around survival, moderation, and reason. Instead, they are defined by emotions, pleasure, and excess. This study borrows from Roland Barthes' dichotomy between "domestic utopia" and "political utopia" to make sense of this evolution. More so than his predecessors (Mercier and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), Fourier politicizes the domestic sphere of the kitchen with the purpose of ensuring the right to a minimum standard of sensual pleasure. Despite their differences, the radical mindset developed in all three utopias helped pave the way for gourmandise to become a democratized and celebrated national activity, one that would eventually lead to new cultural figures and professions (the gourmet and food critic).

Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology by David Ohana

Reviewed by: Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology by David Ohana Aviel Roshwald (bio) Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology By David Ohana. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. 214 pp. There is no better way to set the scene for a review of this book than with a synopsis of its final chapter (coauthored with Michael Feige), an evocative and illuminating interpretive depiction of David Ben-Gurion's December 1973 funeral. Its key aspects having been planned and scripted by Ben-Gurion himself, the funeral was both intentionally and unintentionally symbolic of many of the key ideological and political issues, challenges, and dilemmas faced by the Zionist project and the Israeli state twenty-five years after independence and just a few weeks after the end of the traumatic Yom Kippur War. The burial location was not in Jerusalem but on the edge of the southern desert, at the site of the study and research center that Israel's first prime minister had created adjacent to his chosen place of residence, Kibbutz Sde Boker. The choice of residence and gravesite alike reflected Ben-Gurion's wish to inspire a new generation of Israeli youths to turn their backs on the comforts of urban living and take up the task of settling the Negev and "making the desert bloom." For Ben-Gurion, there was no contradiction between the assertion of the state's central role in the organization of Jewish national life—the principle of mamlakhtiyut (sovereigntism or statism), which he, more than any other of the late Yishuv's and early state's leaders, had been responsible for articulating and institutionalizing—and Israelis' continued commitment to personal engagement in the settlement and cultivation of the land. Yet even as the graves of David and Paula Ben-Gurion became sites of dutiful pilgrimage for dignitaries and ordinary citizens alike, it was the knitted-kippahwearing members of the national religious movement's offshoot Gush Emunim, not the secular kibbutzniks of Labor Zionism, who were to [End Page 205] take the lead in building new settlements and bedroom communities— and not in the Negev Desert but on the occupied West Bank. Israel was to remain, in some sense, in a state of permanent revolution, but its course was to take a very different ideological direction from that envisaged by its founding father. Or was it so different? Is the explicitly and avowedly religious and messianic nationalism of the disciples of the Rabbis Kook (father and son) who came to dominate the settler wing of the national religious movement marked by underlying continuities with or fundamental differences from what Ohana terms the "Promethean messianism" and secular "political theology" predominant among Israel's founding generation? That is the question overhanging all of the essays included in this collection. As is evident from the very first chapter (coauthored with Ari Barell), Ohana retains great admiration for the daring scope and ambition of Ben-Gurion's plans, first seriously laid out during the Second World War, for the integration of technical expertise, political power, and the pioneering ethos of a mobilized nation to create the infrastructure and political capacity for the intake of an anticipated massive inflow of refugees from Europe (the "Million Plan"). (A version of this plan ended up being implemented in the early 1950s in the context of the flight of Jews from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa.) This was, as Ohana sees it, a form of political utopianism that was married to a firm, modernist belief in the transformative potential of twentieth-century science and technology. Yet clearly, in the light of Israel's political trajectory over the half century since the 1967 war, Ohana cannot help but wonder whether any form of political theology or "Promethean messianism" is not liable to lend itself to the revival of religious forms of political messianism divorced from a capacity for rational analysis and incapable of a realistic understanding of the bounds of the politically possible (let alone the ethically justifiable). Each of these essays wrestles with these questions through the lens of a prominent Israeli political or intellectual leader's works, or through the analysis of the evolving depiction...

El París de Haussmann como territorio de la utopía: Victor Fournel (1865) y Victor Hugo (1867)

El resurgimiento del género político-literario de la utopía en las décadas centrales del siglo XIX, ligado a las nuevas condiciones de las metrópolis industriales, presenta en París un privilegiado territorio de aplicación, sobre todo en el momento de los grands travaux del barón Haussmann. Se analizan en este artículo dos textos especialmente signifi cativos a este respecto: el Paris nouveau et Paris futur de Victor Fournel (1865) y la Introduction redactada por Victor Hugo para la Paris Guide editada con motivo de la exposición universal de 1867.

A Prophetic Radical Reform of the Church: The Last Word of Bartolomé de las Casas

In 1566, after several decades of intense and exhausting endeavors to influence and shape the policy of the Spanish state and church regarding the Americas, years of drafting countless historical texts, theological treatises, colonization projects, prophetic homilies, juridical complaints, political utopias, and apocalyptic visions, Bartolomé de Las Casas knows very well that the end is at hand: the end of his life and the end of his illusions of crafting a just and Christian empire in the New World. It is a moment of searching for the precise closure, the right culmination of a human existence that since 1502 had been intimately linked, as no other person of his time, to the drama of the conquest and Christianization of Latin America, a continent, as has been so aptly asserted, “born in blood and fire.

The Year 2016: A Review of the Events Held in Six European Countries

The Year 2016: A Review of the Events Held in Six European Countries

August Ludwig von Rochau and Realpolitik as historical political theory

ABSTRACTNeither self-styled radical ‘realists’ who reject the sort of liberalism inspired by John Rawls, nor liberal ‘realists’ who reject other forms of apparently utopian politics, properly take the measure of how far their accounts of realism recall the historical political theory of nineteenth-century European Realpolitik. This article sketches the evolution of that style of political theory in the thought of its conceptual pioneer, August Ludwig von Rochau, and outlines the bases of his understanding of state power. Reconstructing his argument not only suggests an alternative genealogy for modern realism in political theory, but it also offers a challenge. For behind Rochau’s Realpolitik lies a strong judgment about how ideas are politically consequential only when aligned with state power under modernity, and that such alignments are both historically conditioned and difficult to judge. Rochau’s challenge for realism in contemporary liberal political theory implies that its general antipathy towards writing about the historical evolution of the state and its structural power threatens to leave it as unmoored from practical politics as the so-called ideal-theorists that realists so often profess to criticize.